Thoughts on Summer 2025
At face value this year’s summer vacation (August) was about as mundane, as routine, as could be expected for an Israeli family. How to juggle all the various balls that are our children, our work obligations, all complicated by the lack of childcare. Like all the other families, the answer was a combination of taking as many vacation days as possible in order to keep to a minimum the days of total chaos and figuring it out as you went along.
This was the normal part of August.
Zooming out, however, nothing was normal, everything was surreal.
We visited three different hotels during the summer.
In our first hotel, a terror attack took place in the very room in which we ate breakfast a few weeks before. I didn’t bring my gun to that hotel because I didn’t want the burden while on vacation. A luxury I clearly do not have.
The second hotel in which we stayed was located in the Upper Galilee, where every purchase felt like a mission, a drive to stimulate the economy and bring life back to a region that had been so desolate for far too long. The hotel used to be a palace belonging to a local Arab Sheikh, and the lobby of the palace featured a sword which had been gifted to a general in Israel’s “ally”, the South Lebanon Army, when it was fighting a ragtag guerilla militia called Hezbollah (whatever happened to them, I wonder?). Besides outstanding food and a killer pool, the experience was drenched in wars that Israel has fought over the past eight decades and their accompanying controversies and tragedies. Not much has changed, clearly.
In the last hotel, my heart momentarily leapt through my throat when I recognized the man my age accompanied by a sympathetic IDF officer as Yarden Bibas, who was there with what remained of his extended family. Our wonderful vacation remained wonderful, but the shadow of the past two years’ collective tragedy hang ever more present over us with the recollection of his beautiful wife Shiri, his bright red kids Ariel and little Kfir, and the horrors they endured. They will never swim in a pool again. Our kids played with Yarden’s nieces and nephews, we got movie recommendations from his sister (did she know that we knew?). All normal interactions, but nothing about this was normal – especially not crying fighting back tears while in line for my hand-crafted omelet, watching Yarden play with his beautiful, Ariel-aged nephew.
There was excellent sight-seeing.
At the Hermon mountain we gazed in awe (from afar) at the newly conquered Syrian side, and looked back at an Israeli Golan peppered with missile defense batteries and other military installations. The sight filled me with immense gratitude towards those who were defending the country, only checked by the bizarre fact that I had been one of those defending the country, for the previous one hundred days, finishing just in time to resume my duties as a father and a husband.
While driving back from the Hermon, we stopped by two ostensibly tranquil sites, a soccer field and a river. The soccer field, however was devoid of the classic sound of children playing – instead it was filled with the groan of construction – building a memorial to the twelve beautiful children murdered at that very soccer pitch in Majd-el Shams, mere feet away from the shrapnel ridden bomb shelter they could not get to in time.
The river was the site of the devastating 1997 helicopter crash (known in Hebrew simply as the helicopter disaster) which until October 7th 2023 had been the single deadliest day for the IDF – in which 73 soldiers, 43 of whom from the unit in which I served, perished. Such a beautiful, location fills one with a sense of serenity, haunted by the memories and anguished cries bereaved parents, spouses, children who would never be the same after that day – a pain which has become ubiquitous. My kids shrieking in the car didn’t help either.
This is the reality of the land of Israel, its historic and its modern state. The land flowing with milk and honey tempered by two thousand years of blood, sweat, tears, anguish, iron and shrapnel.
Yet somehow we go on – through either a combination of inertia (where else would we go) or an insatiable quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (wrong country, I know). And in that endeavour, our hope is not yet lost.
